Results indicate that an additional $4.6 billion will be spent over the lifetime of persons who acquired their impairment in 1998. The particularly high costs associated with prelingual onset of severe to profound hearing impairment suggest interventions aimed at children, such as early identification and/or aggressive medical intervention, may have a substantial payback.

Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. This paper reports two experiments whose results are incompatible with this view. Profoundly deaf children were presented with several short stories and were instructed to select (from a set of 4 alternatives) the sentence they thought best completed the story. In Experiment 1 deaf children ranging in age from 9 to 17 years clearly demonstrated their ability to understand novel metaphorical uses of English. In Experiment 2, 14-year-old deaf children who were given feedback on four initial practice items selected the correct metaphorical alternative significantly more often than those who saw no practice items. The conclusion is that deaf children probably do not suffer from some special deficiency uniquely associated with metaphor.

The performance of 52 deaf and 36 normal-hearing children was compared on Piagetian conservation tasks presented under two conditions. In the modified version, the instructions of the task were manipulated so that the conservstion attribute was specific. In the Piagetian condition, there were statistically significant performance differences between the normal-hearing children and the deaf children in favor of the normal hearing children. In the modified condition there were not statistically significant differences between the two populations. The results of the study were viewed as evidence that apparent, cognitive delay in deaf children is, in fact, not cognitive delay at all, but rather a problem with the language associated with cognitive-type problems.

Eight profoundly deaf and six hard-of-hearing children participated in the study. The deaf children had hearing losses of 90dB or greater with a mean hearing loss of 98dB, and the hard-of-hearing children had losses ranging from 27db-85dB with a mean hearing loss of 65dB. All children had a bilateral loss in the speech range 500-2000 Hz (ISO). All of the children ranged in age from 11 years to 16 years 9 months (mean = 13 years) and ranged in IQ from 90-124 (mean = 107). The average language grade level of the hard-of-hearing children was 5.0, and their average reading grade level was 5.4. The average language grade level of the deaf children was 3.2, and their average reading grade level was 3.6. All of the children were presented conservation of liquid and weight problems and 12 metaphor items. The results suggest that hearing loss does not affect the solution of either conservation or metaphor. Intelligence and age factors both affected conservation and metaphor performance; however, the ability to conserve appeared to be the best predictor of metaphor comprehension.

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